Hi my name is Rajesh, and welcome to my video.
In this I’ll talk a little bit about noise cancellation headphones from Bose, supposed to be the top of
the line and best in business. I recently lost my favorite headphones and had to find a replacement.
No one sponsored this video and that pisses me off to no end!!
I’ve done a lot of research and basically came down to Bose and Sony. I’ve always loved Sony
earphones and their audio products in general, but right now, in Australia, the Sony headphones I
like are a good 150-200 dollars more expensive than their Bose counterparts. So, I thought, why not
try Bose and see if they are all they were hyped up to be. A few of my friends and my wife wouldn’t
shut up about it.
I am not going into any of the technical details because, one, I am not qualified to talk about them,
two, I don’t have the equipment to measure any of the metrics. Just read the specs and take their
word for it. They are not going to lie about them, I don’t think. What I will talk about though is more
personal and empirical, as in how I feel about them. How they sound, how they fit and if I feel they
are worth the premium they charge generally.
The NC-700s are outstanding in terms of noise cancellation. I used them at the gym, walking on the
street, and even at my home office while the air conditioner and the dish-washer were both running
a few feet away. It was almost freaky good that I couldn’t tell the dishwasher was running even
when I went to get a snack from the kitchen. Unfortunately though, the fit around my head was
awful. They pinched my ears just after 30 minutes of wearing them, and it was particularly bad at the
gym when they kept slipping off of me when I lie down on the bench. Another annoying thing was
the sweat, for some reason the ear-cups would become very wet and gross and I have to keep wiping
them off with a towel. I suspect its to do with the fact that the noise cancellation design has made
the ear-cups unable to breathe. However, the pain on my ear lobes combined with the sweaty lobes,
and slipping off my head made me immediately regret buying these. But, if you are just going to be
at your desk, and are not going to be physically active while wearing them, and have a regular sized
head unlike my bulbous melon, you should love these. The ear pads don’t fold like most
headphones, apparently because of design requirements noise cancellation. Fewer moving parts
mean better noise cancellation. This is a common theme now, even the new Sonys don’t fold their
ear cups.
Now, lets take a look at QC-45. Right off the bat, it looks very old school. It has a large pronounced
buttons to turn it on, then another big protruding button to switch between noise cancellation
modes, and two buttons to turn volume up and down and another to pause the music. This in 2023,
is not going to fly. Also, the noise cancellation is not customizable, it just comes with two modes,
“quiet” and “aware” NC-700 has a graded range from 0 to 10 that we can adjust on the app, and the
button on the headphones, which is very small and doesn’t pop out by the way, will allow you to
toggle between, zero, five and 10 for NC. Having said that, when I put them on, the QC-45 was a lot
more comfortable on my head. Hence the name “comfort” I guess. The ears didn’t feel squished and
so it was not painful. So, I was ready to forgive its other design qualities, but , this is the part that
kills me, the sound was awful. The bass was just not there, and the higher frequencies sounded like
they are coming from a cheap radio. Why bose why!!!
Another thing I want to talk about is the Bose Connect app, the same app works for both
headphones, but the features are different. QC-45 has only two NC modes, whereas for NC-700 will
allow you to adjust it across the range in increments of one. The equalizer features works similarly
for both of them and hence there is no real difference there.
So long story short, the QC-45 lost out this battle of the Boses, and I think I will hang on to the NC-
700. I may use it for a few weeks at the gym, until I find one specifically for workouts, but NC-700 is
more of a white-collar, home-office kind of thing and not really ideal for active physical work. Also,
its superb noise cancellation means, you will sound crystal clear to your colleagues and clients on
those endless conference calls, and that alone should be worth forgiving some of the other things I
complained about.
Hope you liked the video. As usual, smash that like button, and subscribe while you are at it.